Fear the Hunters
Thematically, The Walking Dead is a broken record; it keeps returning to the idea that men and women are the real monsters amid the zombie apocalypse. This, in turn, makes me into a broken record because ultimately everything of interest in the comic that is worth commenting on connects to the theme of the monstrosity in the heart of man.
When you have no where else to go thematically the only thing you can do is ramp up the extremity, which is exactly what Fear the Hunters does. Brutality is the order of the day. Ben kills Billy, his twin brother, mashing the button on a number of cultural taboos: fratricide, violence against children, violence enacted by children, etc. Carl solves the Gordian knot of what the group should do with Ben by sneaking into van where he's been confined and killing him. Carl acts as judge, jury, and executioner; he is a carnivalesque parody of his father's role as patriarch of the group.
The main event in this arc is the group's encounter with a team of murderous cannibals who call themselves the Hunters. Dale falls into their clutches and gets his leg eaten. (Joke's on them though; Dale is tainted meat because a zombie already chomped on him.) Rick stages a stand-off with the Hunters and, with the aid of Andrea's sharpshooting, manages to disarm and capture them. The group then spends the rest of the evening torturing and killing the cannibals because apparently we needed a heavy-handed reminder that the group--whom we are imagined to still believe are the "heroes" of the narrative--are really just people, and people are really just monsters.
From the hip
- Note that the importance of the confessional act I covered in the last installment rears its head again. Rick thinks he is confessing to the horrid things he did to the Hunters to Abraham, but in reality he's confessing to Carl. Carl confesses to killing Ben to his father. Must be like staring into a mirror.
- The cynical part of me wonders if killing off Ben, Billy, and Dale was a matter of convenience to free Andrea up for some new plot-line. My guess: she and Rick form a romantic attachment.
Previous Installments
The Walking Dead, Volume 10: What We Become
In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault discusses the Catholic rite of confession as part of a larger societal innovation in the West that manages not the wrongdoing of the lone individual, but rather the maintenance and correction of a "sinful" and errant population. What We Become leans heavily on the notion of confession as a way to forge community and the bonds of "population."
To come to a place of mutual understanding, Rick and Abraham confess their sins to each other. Abraham tells Rick that the men of his previous group raped his wife and daughter; Abraham confesses to Rick that his revenge on the rapists was so extreme and grotesque that his wife and daughter were horrified by what he had done, and eventually parted ways with him. In turn, Rick confesses that he killed Dexter and Martinez at the prison to protect Lori and Carl. Even Carl pipes up to confess that he killed Shane to save his father.
These confessions serve to diffuse the growing tension between Rick and Abraham and ease the corrosive effects that those tensions were having on the rest of the group. Now that they have revealed the parts of themselves they feel ashamed about, they understand something important about each other: if each of them questions their actions, they are capable of striving to do better--and therefore worthy of a place within the "population" of survivors. They have done things that don't sit right with their sense of self, but nothing they confess to renders them unassimilable into the communal order.
The Walking Dead works by contrast, by providing both positive and negative examples to drive a point home. In this instance, the importance of confession is underlined by a previous scene in which a character does not or cannot confess to her errant ways. Unwilling to speak about her grief at the death of her family, Maggie instead chooses to slip away into the woods and hang herself. She chooses death over confession, and the results are explosive.
Although Maggie lives, Abraham's belief that it is better to put a bullet in her head now before she returns as a zombie bring him into conflict with Rick; Rick puts a gun to Abraham's head as a threat. Not only does Maggie's refusal to confess her feelings threaten her belief in the group as her larger "family" and her personal connection to Glenn, it spills over into a potentially violent conflict that threatens to tear the "population" apart by pitting the population's leadership against each other.
Previous Installments
Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye
Vol. 2: Miles Behind Us
Vol. 3: Safety Behind Bars
Vol. 4: The Heart's Desire
Vol. 5: The Best Defense
Vol. 6: his Sorrowful Life
Vol. 7: The Calm Before
Vol. 8: Made to Suffer
Vol. 9: Here We Remain
Vol. 10: What We Become
The Walking Dead, Volume 9: Here We Remain
At this point in the Walking Dead's run the comic is firmly revolving around the same set of themes, with only minor variations to add to the title's profluence. This volume, taking place after the catastrophic fall of the prison stronghold, finds Rick and Carl dealing with the trauma of losing Lori and Judith. Rick begins to have telephone conversations with the representative of a mysterious group of survivors, but it is eventually revealed that these phone calls are coming from Rick's deceased wife--which means, of course, that the phone calls are symptomatic of Rick's mental breakdown. There is a spectrality to these phone calls; Lori's voice is a present non-presence reminding Rick of how his failures in the past shape the failures yet to come.
Humans are pack animals, and it isn't long before Rick and Carl are reunited with what remains of their group: Glenn, Maggie, Dale, Andrea, Ben, Billy, Sophia, and Michonne. This reunion serves to underline the tension between the need for group survival and the individual's need to deal with trauma. Rick's use of the telephone to continue dredging up the past--as well as Michonne's conversations with her dead boyfriend--are contrasted against Sophia's obliteration of the past. Sophia has simply erased the memory of her birth mother from her personal experience, refusing to believe that such a person ever existed. Neither way of grappling with trauma--keeping the past in too close proximity versus denying the existence of the past--is functional or healing.
The real problem with unresolved trauma is that it weakens the group's chances of survival and threatens the bonds that allow groups to flourish. It's trauma that has yet to be dealt with that gets in the way of the group's growth with the introduction of Abraham, Rosita, and Eugene. Fatality looms in the background during the mistrustful confrontation between Andrea and Abraham, and it applies the whip hand in the power-struggle relationship between Abraham and Rick.
Though hardly a panacea, what bridges the gaps left by trauma is a sense of purpose. In this case, Eugene's insistence that he knows the cause of the zombie plague and can help stop it if they can get him to Washington D.C. is enough to pull the band together and get them on their feet. Movement, then, is the best medicine, a fact hinted at by the title of the volume. To remain mired in trauma is the suicidal option.
It's obvious o the reader that Eugene does not have any special knowledge of the cause of the zombie epidemic and that the trip to D.C. is a fool's errand. The fact that the comic does so little to present this journey as a sound idea isn't a narrative problem; I think we're supposed to see how hollow a gesture it is, but also recognize that the gesture is important and necessary for the characters within the narrative arc. They're willing to believe in it because they require belief to make survival an option worth effort and exertion. That's what a thin hope looks like, isn't it? People grasp at straws not out of a self-defeating impulse, but rather because it's a viable survival mechanism.
Previous Installments
Days Gone Bye
Miles Behind Us
Safety Behind Bars
The Heart's Desire
The Best Defense
This Sorrowful Life
The Calm Before
Made to Suffer
Finally, that long-awaited siege right? The pay-off for the previous collection's slow burn, yeah? Well, no, actually.
It turns out that The Walking Dead isn't particularly good at delivering big action set pieces. It wants to have the cadence of an action film at times, but I'm not convinced it really captures motion or moment-to-moment tension very well in the way its panels are composed. But there is a lot of carnage in this collection, so we can still pick through the bones:
One thing I like about Made to Suffer is that it shows Andrea being a badass, raining death from above like some kind of law clerk-turned-Valkyrie. I might actually be sad when Andrea dies, as I have no doubt she will at some point. I'm also glad that the tank we saw in the previous collection gets used during the siege. I guess it was Chekov's Tank after all.
When Michonne goes after the fleeing Woodbury crew with Tyreese, is she really trying to winnow their ranks or does she just want another shot at the Governor? The Walking Dead plays literary notions of revenge pretty straight; revenge is a bad impulse because it is over-reaching and always consumes the person who wants vengeance. Michonne's desire for further revenge against the Governor gets Tyreese captured and killed. The Governor's need to be revenged on Rick and Michonne leads him to endanger his people and put himself in a situation where his contagious violence ultimately turns back on him.
Tyreese's beheading at the hands of the Governor is intense and disturbing, which is the point, but it's somewhat uncomfortable that the most gratuitous scenes of violence in the comic all make the bodies of people of color the occasion of torture and degradation. Michonne's violation by the governor, the Governor's torture at the hands of Michonne, Tyreese's decapitation with Michonne's katana as wielded by the Governor are all scenes in which the extremity of violence is a thing visited by one person of color on another. I'm not sure what to make of that--it could be coincidental--but I also kinda think it isn't.
Speaking of violence, the comic uses the two-part siege as an opportunity to divest itself of some minor characters we probably aren't going to miss anyway: goodnight and thank you, Axel, Patricia, Billy, Hershel, and Alice. The sloppiest death here is Alice's because it just seems like her purpose in the narrative was to delivery Lori's baby and then die.
Speaking of Lori and her baby...okay, I can't imagine being a reader of this comic and not seeing their deaths coming. Once the minor characters are cleared off the board, you gotta kill someone important to give the reader that gut-punch feeling, right? Unfortunately, their deaths feel as cheap as Alice's death--as if the baby was introduced just so we'd be shocked when she gets caught in the crossfire with her mother.
And we have every indication that it is supposed to be an outrage that we feel personally affronted by because that's exactly how Lilly, one of the Woodbury crew, reacts to it in our place as a fictional proxy for the read. Her reaction is at once didactic and intended as catharsis; even though she's on the Governor's side, and the one who pulled the trigger on mother and daughter, the deaths of Lori and Judith spur her to shoot the Governor and toss him to the zombies.
From the hip:
- Lots of rhetoric used on both sides of the siege that sits uncomfortably with our modern political moment. Lots of talk about the safety of fences, lots of pleas to "think of the children," plenty of "the other side are evil savages and they are the ones responsible for the existence of crime in the world."
- Oh hey, Rick gets wounded again.
- Oh hey, I guess the Governor makes out with his zombiefied niece? Like we didn't realize he was the bad guy or something, this had to be thrown in there?
- Hah, Michonne and Tyreese ambush a guy when he's peeing. This is such a modern trope: you can tell when a drama, particularly a "prestige format" television show is trying to convince you that it is GRITTY and REAL when it includes somebody taking a piss.
- Also, it's comical that Michonne can slice through anything in one swing with her sword, but the Governor takes forever to behead Tyreese.
As the name implies, the issues that make up The Calm Before provide a lull in the action to build up to the big confrontation when the Governor's forces assault the survivor's prison compound. Although there is some action in The Calm Before--it's not all navel gazing--the theme of this collection is vulnerability.
In The Walking Dead, vulnerability takes two primary forms. Vulnerability can be a structural or systemic weakness that decreases the possibility of survival. When Dale points out that the survivors in the prison have a scarcity of guns and manpower compared to the residents of Woodbury, he's pointing out a structural flaw in their defenses that may endanger them in times of siege. When Alice expresses her concerns about her ability to successfully deliver Lori's baby, she's gesturing toward a deficiency in the group's survival capabilities--are they equipped to take care of routine medical needs, let along emergencies? Even the presence of a pregnant woman is emphasized as a potential risk to the system they have in place.
The deeper, more formidable and pernicious, kind of vulnerability in The Walking Dead is personal, emotional vulnerability. This form is more challenging for the characters to address; a depleted stockpile of bullets has an easy solution--you scavenge for more bullets. But personal vulnerabilities prove to be just as dangerous, since they threaten to break the bonds that allow the survivors to act with unity and purpose, but with the added problem that their deep-seated emotional nature means they can't be addressed head on. Vulnerability is difficult to unpack because the process that addresses it opens up further vulnerabilities before reaching any possibility of closure.
Personal vulnerabilities in The Calm Before range from minor tensions to major issues simmering beneath the surface that threaten to explode if tapped too hard. We find examples of minor-key issues in Patricia's feelings of being excluded after aiding Dexter and Andrew against the group, the lack of effort to integrate Alice into the group's community apart from reliance on her medical skill, the religious-familial disagreements between Maggie and Hershel, and Dale experiencing jealousy at the thought of Andrea and Tyreese becoming closer.
The more fraught vulnerabilities are positioned to affect the leaders and doers of the group--heavy is the head that wears the crown, perhaps. We're accustomed to seeing Michonne as a stone-cold badass, but it's clear that her sense of self was deeply damaged by what she endured at the Governor's hands--or damaged by the kind of revenge she took against him. Rick gets at least two kinds of vulnerability: it's pointed out during a basketball game that he isn't as physically useful since losing a hand in Woodbury, and he can't even bear to have a conversation with Lori about her relationship with Shane or the possibility that he might not be the father of the baby that is on the way.
Of course, although the comic illustrates the ways that vulnerability is a minefield to navigate, it also demonstrates that when vulnerabilities are allowed to fester they eventually take the shape of tragedies. Carol, feeling cut off from any sort of human connection that would make survival worthwhile after being rejected by Tyreese, Rick, and Lori, decides to feed herself to a zombie. There is a poetic resonance here: her feelings of alienation are so complete that she decides to alienate herself from the group by becoming something other than human. Her self-abjection is horrifying because it is grotesquely terminal and pointless, particularly since it was entirely avoidable--but vulnerability is the bruise that no one wants to touch.
From the hip:
- When Dale works through the vulnerability he feels at the thought that Andrea would prefer to be with Tyreese (especially sexually) he arrives at an option that Rick and Lori thoroughly rejected when it was broached by Carol: he tells Andrea that he's okay with her fucking Tyreese, if that's what she needs. It's kind of nice to see the notion of "the rules change in the apocalypse" actually explored as a possibility instead of something the characters have a reactionary response to.
- It's also noteworthy that it is one of the older characters who can make peace with the idea of a plural relationship; very interesting development, that. Perhaps with age comes a realization that the times change, and you either change with them or get left behind. The younger characters may not have had to even consider that yet.
- Speaking of Dale, he loses a foot in a zombie attack but the quick amputation seems to have spared him from becoming a zombie himself--something that was tried earlier in the series without positive results. Perhaps the group can figure out how to arrest the "infection" in time.
- Although the comic is dealing with deeper emotional territory than most popular comics attempt, it's interesting to chart the ways that The Walking Dead still indulges in comic book-isms. Michonne's katana, for example, easily lops through both of an enemy's wrists with one swipe--shades of Wolverine, you know? Additionally, the final panel of the collection shows the Governor perched on a god-damn tank like a G.I. Joe villain as he charges the prison compound. I mean, come on, check this out:
Previous Read-Throughs of The Walking Dead:
Days Gone Bye
Miles Behind Us
Safety Behind Bars
The Heart's Desire
The Best Defense
This Sorrowful Life
Part six of our read-through of the collected volumes of The Walking Dead. Read the rest of the series here.
This Sorrowful Life begins with Rick, Glenn, and Michonne still imprisoned in Woodbury, but their imprisonment doesn't last long. Martinez, a former gym teacher and current citizen of Woodbury, helps Rick's crew escape--and they take along Dr. Stevens and Alice as well. The escape from Woodbury, and the Governor's clutches, is easy--too easy, in fact.
However, before we move away from Woodbury we get one last view of the way the Governor leverages the violence of his gladiatorial arena as part of his bread-and-circuses regime. After one of his usual arena combatants gets offed by another for smashing out the latter's teeth, the Governor approaches Michonne about "performing" in the arena for the populace's amusement. He sets the ground rules--they want to see a violent struggle, but no one is supposed to get seriously hurt. This is entertainment, and a way of channeling the citizens' violent impulses in a controllable direction instead of letting them coalesce into resistance to his rule.
But when it comes down to the arena fight, nothing can contain Michonne's deadly prowess; she kills her opponent, and destroys all the "biters" in the ring as well. This sequence illustrates Michonne's skill with a blade, but it also draws attention to the shaky dividing line between the kind of violence we're willing to accept as entertaining spectacle and the kind of violence we find gratuitous and wish to exclude where possible from our culture.
The rules the Governor set before the "match" were meant to police that dividing line. He has a good sense of where the line is; after Michonne's massacre, one of the onlookers complains to him that the violence of the night's performance has overstepped the bounds--it went too far and wasn't the kind of violence acceptable for her children to see. Of course, the implicit critique troubles all sorts of arbitrary divisions we've erected regarding violence: is this a PG-13 movie or an R movie?; does this album or video game need an advisory label on it?; why are we more permissive about violence in general but puritanical about sex?; etc.
Although the rest of the group makes their departure from Woodbury, Michonne opts to stay behind to get payback on the Governor. At first, her confrontation with the Governor has the hallmarks of a classic standoff--which one of them will get to the katana first and kill the other?--but it quickly devolves into a torture-porn sequence in which Michonne uses pliers, a hammer, an acetylene torch, a spoon, and a power drill to exact revenge on the Governor for beating and raping her repeatedly. It's a deeply unpleasant sequence that leaves the Govenor maimed and dismembered.
And yet, despite its grotesquery, the Governor's torture rings a little hollow. It doesn't provide catharsis; the barbarism of the scene doesn't weigh itself against the brutality done to Michonne as a way of balancing the scales. Michonne realizes this herself--she vomits at the degradation she's inflicting and gains more trauma to deal with rather than purging the violation she suffered at the Governor's hands. If this scene is meant to emphasize the idea that people who are subjected to monstrous violence become violent monsters themselves, it's underscoring an idea the comic has already leaned on heavily in past issues. This particular depiction feels graphic for the sake of being graphic, like the comic is toying with the boundary between titillating its reader through ultraviolence while attempting to be critical of how, why, and on what terms we vicariously encounter violent media, but as much as that dovetails to the earlier questions raised about violence-as-entertainment in Woodbury (and Western culture in general), it also feels like it's raising questions it isn't really prepared to answer.
Back at the prison, Rick, Alice, Glenn, and Martinez arrive to discover that the safe haven has been overrun by zombies. (Dr. Stevens didn't make it there; we barely knew ye, Doc.) The zombies get pushed back, and it turns out everybody is okay. (Except Otis. Which one was he again? Oh, right, the racist one. We also hardly knew ye.) Once order is restored at the prison, Rick realizes why they had such an easy time escaping Woodbury: Martinez was helping them so that he could learn the location of the prison and then bring his people from Woodbury to it as well.
Rick heads out to catch Martinez before he can bring word of the prison's location back to Woodbury. Rick runs Martinez down with the RV and then strangles him to death with his one remaining good hand. Later, Rick explains to Lori how effortless it was for him to kill Martinez, even though Martinez was probably being honest about wanting to provide a new start for the "good" citizens of Woodbury (rather than the Governor's psychopaths).
Rick doesn't really care about Martinez's motives; as he says, he feels nothing at having murdered a man. All of this should be harder hitting stuff, but like all of the other "a violent world diminishes our sense of humanity" themes currently orbiting around Michonne's plotline, we've seen this all before--and often in ways that were more subtle, compelling, and gut-wrenching. I'm a little worried that the series is running out of gas at this point and recycling its central themes. Put it this way: the return of Nihilist Rick does not hit as hard as the introduction of Nihilist Rick.
From the hip:
- There is no way that we've seen the last of the Governor, even though Michonne messed him up royally. I won't believe he's gone until we see the corpse.
- When Rick runs off, leaving his family behind once again, Carl voices a question that the reader has likely been asking for a while now: if Rick is so concerned with protecting his family, why does he leave them alone and unguarded so often?
- The first interaction One-Hand Rick has with Tyreese is Tyreese remarking that Rick is now less of an alpha male due to his disability. It's okay, though; they later make up and are bros again. But can they shake on it?
- The introduction of Alice as a character who can help pregnant Lori give birth is a tad bit convenient.
- Is Glenn looting dead bodies to find a wedding ring so he can propose to Maggie morbid or sweet? Jury's out.
- Remember how I was talking about how all the references to the prison as a castle were priming the series for the introduction of a siege storyline? Called it! I mean, come on, it was like Chekov's gun.
Even though the previous collection of The Walking Dead ended with Rick's nihilist pronouncement that he and his fellow survivors are ontologically equivalent to the zombies all around them, The Best Defense picks up at a moment removed from Rick's descent into existential pessimism. Instead, we see something of a return to the old Rick of earlier issues; he's busy organizing and fortifying the prison into a stronghold that will enable the group's survival. With the discovery of a cache of weapons and riot armor, the prison becomes a feudal castle; when Rick and Glenn don riot gear to venture beyond the prison's barricades, they do so as armored knights errant sent to protect the kingdom from invaders. These images and the actions they foreshadow gesture toward a stark possibility about the prison: if it is to be the group's castle, it must be a castle that can withstand a siege.
Glenn and Rick's knightly quest for gasoline is interrupted when they observe a helicopter go down a few miles away. Off they go, with ronin Michonne in tow, on a further quest to discover crash survivors on the boundaries of their domain. Back within the prison, Lori again feels (rightfully) abandoned by Rick's willingness to always be the one who takes action far afield instead of staying near his family.
While Rick is away, Carol takes the opportunity to make an unusual proposal to Lori: she suggests that she "wed" both Lori and Rick, becoming part of their family. Carol explains that in this new world of survival against the walking dead, the old rules don't have to apply. And she's right. Since survivors will be forced to remake the world one way or another, they need not be bound by traditions, customs, or mores that no longer fit the world in which they're forced to live.
But Lori will have none of it; she's not an open-minded woman--she cites the effect that a polyamorous relationship might have on the children--and rejects Carol's idea out of hand. Through this odd-yet-stereotypical interaction, Walking Dead poses a series of questions about our adaptability: if we had to rebuild the social world through which humanity coheres, could we do it anew or are we, as a species, inextricably bound to the social formations we've inherited? Is change, even when it might abet our survival, something we have difficulty navigating? Do the lines, rules, and strictures of interpolation and tradition have too tight a hold over not just what we think, but how we think and what we're able to imagine?
Our collective inability to break free from the hegemony of old patterns is underscored in several ways. When Rick, Glenn, and Michonne find themselves in the clutches of the Governor, he imparts a missing piece of why everything has gone to hell in the big cities: when the National Guard was called out to turn metropolises into sanctuaries, the men and women of the Guard couldn't let go of the idea that they needed to protect their families first and foremost. And so the cities went undefended because those with the power and mandate to make a difference simply couldn't think beyond the basic survival of their immediate tribe. They couldn't bring themselves to do something unprecedented in response to extraordinary circumstances.
The other way we see old habits dying hard is in the ridiculous artifacts of more civilized times that the various characters crave even though those artifacts have no meaningful place in the dangerous world that confronts them. Foremost of these misfit artifacts is entertainment. Carol is thrilled at the prospect of having access to the prison's library, and positively overjoyed at the thought of being able to watch a movie once they get the generator working in the prison. The possibility of movie night again rears its head as a form of escapism that might allow the survivors in the prison to forget, at least momentarily, that Michonne, Rick, and Glenn haven't yet returned from their expedition.
The craving for entertainment takes a darker form in Woodbury, where the Governor has arranged for gladiatorial combat to keep his populace dependent on the bread and circuses he provides. As the Governor states, "There's a lesson there. You gotta keep people occupied or they'll turn on you. Reading and fucking will only keep people busy for so long." Entertainment, then, is both a instrument of social control and a numbing form of self-medication and self-distraction. The ways that entertainment, especially bloodsport, appeases the populace is gruesome, but its not nearly as horrific as the populace's willful complicity in allowing that bloody spectacle to effect who they are and what they will accept as human beings.
The Walking Dead posits that our habitual desire to be entertained renders us vulnerable to a corrosive habit of distraction that has the potential to eat away at our humanity--or at least sedate it into quiet compliance. The reliance on spectacle, then, is just one more pattern that we cannot leave behind, even though distraction can be fatal in a post-apocalyptic world and escapism is a weakness when the current situation demands all of your focus purely as a matter of survival. Notably, despite the Governor's understanding of the role that entertainment plays in the community he leads, he isn't immune to it. The Governor keeps the severed heads of his victims in tanks as if they were so many television screens competing for his attention. He's seemingly aware that watching the heads diverts him for his purpose--he ironizes the moment by saying "Fifty-seven channels and nothing on"--but he still can't tear himself away from this macabre pageantry of his own creation.
But nothing in The Best Defense even comes close to the Grand Guignol grotesquery that is the Governor's repeated rape of Michonne. Michonne's abuse is framed as a form of entertainment for the Governor. Sexual gratification doesn't seem to figure into his ends; the pleasure he finds is in breaking the will of a strong woman. And yet, the sexual violence the Governor inflicts on Michonne is largely without purpose. Despite claiming that he does terrible things in the name of survival and keeping order, he knows that he's never going to get the information he wants about the prison from her.
Michonne's assault is essentially a private theater of brutality that stages savagery for the benefit of a sole sadistic viewer in the comic's fictive world. The Governor's hope is that he can lead her to the final cathartic scene he desires--to crush her spirit to the point where she takes her own life. All of which means, of course, that Michonne's rape is another distraction that dehumanizes, another spectacle that unmans, another entertainment that functions as negation. This critique becomes more pointed when we realize that it is being delivered through a piece of entertainment media that is currently horrifying its audience with a depiction of sexual assault--and yet, we aren't likely to break the cycle of reliance or the pattern of mediation either. Instead, our complicity is likely unnoticed or perhaps just brushed away; we reach for the next issue because we must be entertained.
From the hip:
- If donning the riot gears transforms Rick and Glenn into post-apocalyptic knights, it is playing with the imagery of a particularly fascist knighthood. If Rick's authority as a former policemen reached troubling extremes before, it's chilling to think of how that power might be exercised when given the equipment of militarized police intended to crush dissent.
- While siphoning gasoline outside the prison, Glenn takes a moment to ask Rick if he thinks that Maggie would think less of him for being so proficient at sucking gas through a rubber tube. Glenn's need for reassurance about his masculinity is almost comical at this point, but it is noteworthy that he seeks affirmation from a man and not from women.
- A point of comparison: Rick is unwilling to do what the National Guard was not--he's always running off instead of staying put to defend his immediate family, as Lori wishes he would.
- Andrea reinforces the idea that the prison will have to sustain a siege when she stands atop its walls and mentions that some day they may be called upon to keep humans, not just zombies, out of their fortress. It's Chekov's castle.
- Of course, the violent, power-mad, survival-obsessed Governor is essentially what Rick would have become if Tyreese hadn't intervened.
- Something tells me the Governor's not going to get the ending he's dreaming of with Michonne.
- As a person possessing an advanced degree in literature, I am legally obligated to whisper "Symbolic castration" in your ear during the scene in which the Governor chops one of Rick's hands off.
I cut out of The Walking Dead tv show before Michonne showed up in it, but I distinctly remember being in a bar the day after her debut episode, listening in on a couple nerds (and I mean that lovingly) gush about how cool a character she is. And she is cool, in the classic metaphoric sense. Armed with a katana, Michonne is the samurai counterpoint to Rick Grime's whitehat cowboy shtick. She's deadly, stoic, fatalistically self-contained, possesses the ability to explode from silence into action, and (deep down) is more than a little tragic in the Romantic sense. Cool.
But if Michonne is a samurai, she's definitely the masterless ronin sort; her coolness also manifests as a distinct detachment from social bonds and a disregard for the bonds of others. When Michonne wants sex from Tyreese, she simply asks for it--with no thought given to how that will impact his relationship with Carol or the group dynamic in place before she arrived. Of course, since The Walking Dead is at least partially a soap opera, Carol catches an eyeful of the blowjob that Michonne gives Tyreese. In what is one of the sadder scenes in the series so far, that night Carol attempts to give Tyreese head--an act she's not comfortable with. She's trying to give him something he must need (why else would he get it with another woman?), but it's really a moment of internalized emotional coercion--and she knows it. Her bond with Tyreese, a bond that had sustained them both through the horrors of the apocalypse, is now broken, and leads Carol to attempt suicide by slitting her wrists.
Sometimes coolness cuts like that.
If the Carol-Tyreese-Michonne love triangle exemplifies the thwarting and complication of this volume's title--The Heart's Desire--Rick's continued progression into a fascistic worldview is the extension of his desire for control as a means to gain safety, both personally and for the group he feels responsible for. Rick's behavior is disturbing. He decides who is allowed weapons--the tools of survival--inside the prison; members of the group only have guns at Rick's permission, and Michonne is told to surrender her sword if she wants to stay inside the prison. Rick also apparently has the authority to restrict movement and agency; some of the prison's residents are locked inside their cells at night because they have not yet earned Rick's trust.
Aside from controlling the movements and vulnerability of the group, Rick also feels empowered to enact force upon their bodies. When Allan is bitten by a zombie, Rick decides to amputate his leg to see if they can prevent Allan from turning into one of the undead. Although Rick's action may be altruistic (it may also be an experiment with a human test subject), it's important to note that he makes the decision to remove Allan's limb without Allan's consent or even group consensus. Rick is free to act because he feels that there is no one he answers to; he is the only sovereign agent within the prison.
The most egregious abuse of his position of leadership occurs when Rick kills Dexter. During an incursion of zombies, Rick sees an opportunity to rid himself of Dexter--the man who was just holding him at gunpoint and threatening to kick Rick's group out of the prison's sanctuary--and he takes it, shooting him down and later blaming his death on friendly fire. This is murder followed by propaganda to disguise murder. The art accompanying this scene shows Rick's face totally obscured by shadow; he has become unrecognizable as the protagonist of the story.
This is, of course, a moment of snarling fascist hypocrisy. Rick casually violates his own law, "You Kill. You Die," because the king's word is only ever binding upon those subject to his will. Just as God cannot create a boulder he cannot lift, Rick cannot utter a pronouncement that sets limits upon his own actions. Since he feels that his actions are always to the group's benefit, to be forced to play by his own rules would be to risk the group's safety. Rick has unconsciously begun to live within his own personally engineered state of exception.
Rick's desire for safety has fully become synonymous with a desire for power. His assumption of authority as the means of security illustrate the fundamental tension in every fascist regime: fascism requires that the community feel threatened, but also requires that the threat be conquerable by the authoritarian's infallible authority over the community. As Umberto Eco wrote, fascism requires that the people living under it "feel threatened" by the "force of their enemies." As such, life is only seen as struggle and struggle becomes viewed as a way of life--which is certainly true of the traumatized survivors of the zombie apocalypse. And yet, despite the overwhelming threat of zombies without and enemies within, Rick feels self-assured that the struggle can be won and the group can survive--as long as they are willing to surrender their agency to his authority, his law, his will.
The tension between the struggle for existence and Rick's insistence that if they follow his lead he can guarantee the group's survival explodes quickly because the theater of Rick's power has an audience too small for uncritical mass acceptance; fascism is a syncretic faith that cannot withstand the scrutiny of the individual's faculty for critical analysis. When Tyreese challenges the hypocrisy of Rick's actions and decisions, and thereby exposes the dark truth that Rick's desire for control has been masked by the notion of protecting the group, Rick has no rational justification for his behavior or the ideology behind it. His only response is a violent outburst intent on keeping and consolidating his power.
However, Rick meets his match in Tyreese, both intellectually and physically. Every accusation that Tyreese hurls at Rick is correct, and Tyreese is strong enough that Rick can't simply beat him into submission. Both men tumble over a railing, and Rick is knocked unconscious. When Rick awakes more than a day later, he is a changed man. But he isn't changed for the better. Rick's fascism gives way to nihilism. Initially, Rick seems glad to be free of the burden of leadership. In his absence, the group has decided that a more democratic, committee-based way of making decisions is wiser than leaving authority in the hands of one man.
Rick approves of this change, but not because he has seen the monster he was becoming; he approves of the change ambivalently because he no longer feels that any of it actually matters. When Rick says "We are the walking dead," what he means is that the only difference between the survivors and the zombies is a matter of time--the former will inevitably become the latter, and the notion of exerting authority to forestall that becoming is nothing more than fantasy. Rick simply can't believe in a world in which security is made possible without his own unconstrained authority.
From the hip:
- While in the prison, the group trades in their old, smelly clothing and adopts spare orange jumpsuits from the prison's supply--further underlining that life under King Rick I is a kind of prison sentence.
- Racism is often bubbling under the surface of The Walking Dead, but Otis accusing Patricia of being a race traitor for aiding Andrew and Dexter is one of the comic's more pointed expressions of rising racial hostilities within the group of survivors.
- Of course there are no women on the leadership committee formed after Rick and Tyreese brawl. Of course there aren't.
- The Walking Dead does an interesting reversal in Rick's transformation from authority figure to bleak malcontent; usually disenfranchised white guys go from nihilism to fascism, but Rick walks backwards here.
The Walking Dead's group of survivors are, of course, in search of a safe haven--which leads them to an "abandoned" prison that seems like a good spot to stake a claim on. The prison has a lot to offer: secure walls, a stockpile of food, room for everyone to have at least a modicum of privacy, and land enough to start a self-sustaining farm. However, this is also a moment of irony: a prison is a place where we incarcerate the dangerous to keep the wider world safe, but now that the world has become unfathomably dangerous, the prison's thick walls become a place in which survivors incarcerate themselves for safety. There is also the implication that, whoever they may be, the inmates of a prison are always already dangerous. We might question whether a prison is actually the most thematically apt home for this particular group of characters.
Unmindful of the irony implicit in this situation, there is a preponderance of talk in this volume about civilization. When the characters speak about civilization they tend to talk in two directions; they speak about the reality of civilization's collapse and about civilization as a theoretical concept. Some of their talk strays into talking about civilization as a reified ideal. Rick's comments about the lack of civilization in the outside world during this apocalyptic moment is very telling: "From the looks of it, our government has crumbled. There's no communication, no resistance, any military presence, which I'll admit seems odd. It appears civilization is pretty well screwed." To Rick's mind, then, civilization equals the government and the military. It is something that can communicate to its constituents and it is something capable of resistance. Civilization is authority and control leveraged for the protection of the people.
Since Rick is a former policeman who still behaves as if he is on duty, this worldview makes sense for his character. Notice that he still wears his badge, as if it signifies anything without the society that lends it meaning. We've already seen him assume the mantle of authority by positioning himself as the surrogate of government and military force, and thus as the defender of an imperiled notion of civilization. Now that a potentially secure location seems to promise the opportunity to start a new life--their own private slice of civilization--Rick assumes more and more authority, but the assumption of leadership does not go as unquestioned as it did in the days when the group's survival was more in doubt.
Rick decides that he will return to Hershel's farm and get Hershel to bring what's left of his family to the prison. Although there is some talk of the prison being a better bet for the survival of Hershel's family, it feels like the real rationale is that the group will require Hershel's knowledge of farming to make a real go of transforming the prison into a community that doesn't depend on foraging for food in the dangerous world outside its gates. Rick never really stops to consider how Hershel might feel about packing up and moving to the prison. Hershel's skills are needed, and Rick sets out to make sure that his group will have access to them. That's not quite what we'd call civilization, but it is a combination of authority and force.
Rick's assumption of authority takes a darker turn when it is revealed that there is a killer in their midst. Hershel agreed to come to the prison at Rick's request, but there is a price to be paid for following what Rick thinks is best: two of his daughters are killed by someone within the prison walls. Blame immediately falls on Dexter, a black man who was imprisoned for the murder of his wife and the man she had taken up with. That's a crime of passion, not a cold-blooded murder like the one they're currently dealing with--but it doesn't matter, as the black man is considered a threat and his guilt is assumed. The real murderer turns out to be Thomas, a white man who claims he was in the prison because of tax evasion. Even in the post-apocalyptic world you're more in danger of a "lone wolf" white man snuffing out your life than anything else.
But this scene is only about prejudice in a minor key way; it has much more to say about authority, how it is constructed, and whether it can allow itself to be questioned. The revelation of Thomas's guilt poses a problem for the civilization burgeoning behind the prison's walls: what are their laws and how will they administer justice? Again, Rick assumes authority; as a lawman, he acts as though his opinion is a binding logos. Rick says that a killer must be killed. "You kill. You die," he pronounces. The verbiage of his statement is chilling; the sparseness of the language feels unquestionable, the simplicity of it is asserted authority masked as truism. Most of the group agree with him, but there are fault lines here. Lori, for example, isn't so sure that Rick should have the ability to make that call for the group as a whole. She accuses him of acting like a father, of playing God; even if the group is better off without Thomas in the fold, she's correctly heard the tenor of Rick's dictum.
The most troubling thing about Rick's version of justice is its fundamental disconnect from the laws he upheld as a policeman. He does not talk about rights, about fair trials, or about juries composed of peers. His attitude is that when civilization is at its most fragile, it must be defended vigorously with force and the imposition of unquestioned authority--even if it means that the philosophical underpinnings of civilization must give way. Rick doesn't even bother with dispensing justice equally. He knows that Tyreese is guilty of killing Chris, but he covers up the murder that Tyreese committed. The appearance of justice is just as good as the real thing if it works in service of keeping authority inviolate. In his mania to forge a polity in the prison, Rick is willing to abandon the ideals that make a civilization worthwhile in the name of security and safety.
Of course, Rick's attitude is essentially fascist, and it is one that blows up spectacularly in his face. Enforcing his authority by pummeling Thomas moves Rick no closer to the locus of justice, and he manages to mangle his own hand in the process. The wound is castrating; his attempt to exert force renders him unable to deploy it as well as he could before--without his right hand, he's no longer the best shot in the group.
Similarly, when Dexter acquires force of his own through access to the firearms stockpiled in the guard tower, we get a clear depiction of how the idea of "might makes right" ultimately works against Rick's aims; in the final panels of the volume, Dexter has assumed authority and power and is insisting that the group leave the prison, as well as all the hopes they've pinned on it as a safe haven, because he sees no place for people like them in his polity. Dexter calls them "crazies," and names their condition as "broken." He's not wrong; the only thing that differentiates Rick's group from the prisoners is numbers. In the end, who belongs in a civilization, who will have recourse to authority, and who gets to exercise power is all down to whose finger is currently on the trigger.
From the hip:
- Startled by a zombie as they're clearing out the prison, Rick bemoans the idea of getting used to the ever-present threat that the zombies represent. This is interesting to me because, as much as Rick is always preoccupied with the idea of survival, he fails to see that getting used to horrific traumas is an essential part of the survival process.
- The ways of opting out of the civilization the group begins building within the prison hardly look like pleasant alternatives. We have the suicide pact between Chris and Julie (that goes horribly wrong) and Tyreese's suicidal one-man rush against the zombies in the prison gym as nonviable alternatives.
- Sex is still the troubled intersection where physical survival and human emotional needs collide. Deprived of female companionship during their incarceration, Dexter and Andrew have formed a sexual and emotional relationship. Axel insinuates to Andrew that the introduction of the women in Rick's groups of survivors threatens his bond with Dexter. Now that women are available, surely Dexter will be "switching sides" and abandon Andrew. There is a lot to unpack from this small scene: the way that necessity mediates the kind of relationships we have, fluidity based on circumstances, the human need to maintain connections, and the multiform ways in which those connections are threatened by "interlopers."
- Speaking of Andrew, I'm not sure if this was an intentional way of telegraphing his sexuality, but I think he's drawn in a very feminized way. I initially thought he was a female character, in fact.
The first volume of The Walking Dead ended with the death of Shane, and there is no way that the second is going to let us forget that. We immediately get a flashback scene to the start of Lori's affair with Shane, which is in turn linked to the notion that to live during the apocalypse inevitably changes a person. Rick describes the change in Shane's character as "drastic," but that undersells it by quite a bit. It would be more accurate to describe Shane's descent as a "monstrous" change of heart. But even Shane's sudden, horrific willingness to kill his best friend is given an understandable explanation: the stress of survival is transformative, and whatever alterations it brings pose profound dangers to the self and the cohesive of the social units to which they belong. Any individual person can only endure so much before the breaking point makes them a liability to the survival of the group and an internal threat. Stress we cannot cope with makes us the enemy within.
As a way of exploring the idea that the group's survival is dependent on the individual's ability to handle stress, The Walking Dead starts loading its protagonist with new stresses to illustrate that not even a square-jawed hero is immune to the eruption of personal demons. First, Rick learns that Lori is pregnant. If the world hadn't gone to hell, this would be cause for celebration; but in a zombie-plagued landscape where the living are hanging on by a thread, being in the family way pushes new obstacles and concerns to the forefront for a guy who is already expected to provide for and protect both his immediate family and the larger familial unit of the group. When Lori and Rick break their news to the group, no one knows how to respond because, given the context, this isn't a joyous occasion. Of course, because The Walking Dead is a soap opera at heart, Lori's pregnancy carries an additional layer of stress in that Rick can't be sure that the baby is his.
When The Walking Dead starts piling it on one character, it really unloads on them. With the prospect of a difficult addition to his family on his mind, Rick also has to deal with his son Carl getting shot during a hunting accident. This is the incident that pushes Rick past his personal breaking point and reveals that, although it might take more to get him there, he has the same sort of monstrosity lurking under his heroic exterior that we have already seen unleashed through Shane's murderous breakdown. Rick's blind rage and willingness to kill Otis for shooting his son is understandable, but it also delineates that even a good man might not hesitate to pull the trigger when the thing he clings to is being taken away from him. Perhaps we get a sense of why Lori is drawn to both Shane and Rick; they aren't so different, after all.
Of course, Rick doesn't end up killing Otis, but it's easy to imagine that if he did it would have a disastrous impact on the group's stability. Knowing what we do about Rick's sentimentality and hidden fragility, it is likely that he would soon spiral out of control and leave the group without its linchpin. The comic gives us a displaced version of how Rick might hypothetically response to loss; Allen's nearly-complete emotional shut down after the death of Donna could be taken as an alternate universe version of Rick's fate should he lose Carl, Lori, and his internal moral compass. Indeed, this chapter of the story gives us another instance of a good man who is pushed too far by hellish circumstances; after the death of his son and daughter in the barn, Hershel snaps and draws down on Rick the same way that Shane drew down on Rick and in the same way that Rick drew down on Otis.
Much of the stress depicted in this chapter is directly related to the assumption that if the group is it to survive it must have a leader who is both stereotypically male and stereotypically capable. Dale reveals that the reason the group hadn't moved camp earlier was because Shane--the default masculine authority--didn't endorse the idea. Now that Rick has assumed the role left vacant by Shane's death, it all falls to him to be the locus of authority they seem to expect and desire. Dale makes it clear that it has to be Rick: Dale is too old (and therefore too weak), Glenn is too young (and therefore not yet truly a man), and Allen is simply too incompetent (he later reveals that Donna wore the pants in their family, which is a damning sin according to the patriarchal order being established here). The oddest part of the exchange between Rick and Dale about the need for a man to lead them to the promised land of safety is that Rick doesn't question the imposition of the role or even the worldview behind it. Rick also seems to believe that the role is a natural requirement and that he is the obvious candidate to take on the mantle.
With all of this potentially fatal stress buffeting the group at every turn, the characters use sex as their release valve. There is a massive, and obvious, emphasize on sex, pair bonding, and the need for physical and emotional intimacy even in close quarters in this volume. Dale and Andrea are spotted having sex as a way of getting through Amy's death; Glenn and Maggie have sex to boost Glenn's feelings of inadequacy and give Maggie something of her own not related to her family; Chris and Julie have sex as a form of rebellion against life under what they perceive to be Tyreese's thumb; Tyreese immediately pairs off with Carol beause both need reaffirmation after their personal losses. Even the interactions of Carl and Sophie are viewed by the adults in the group through this lens; there is a heightened level of projection here that assumes that the children will ultimately end up together because they will inevitably need to rely on each other in the same way that the adults currently need each other as physical and emotional reassurance.
However, as much as sex is one of the few pleasures they have recourse to in an anhedonic world, it is an imperfect form of release. Sex can function like any other stressor for the group and can threaten the group dynamic. Rick's worries over Lori's pregnancy, to say nothing of his anxieties that another rooster has been in the hen house, are the most stark illustration of this, but it crops up for the other characters as well. The introduction of Tyreese and the ease with which Tyreese catches Carol's attention puts Glenn in a mindset where he reconsiders his sense of belonging within the group; the sexual relationship between Chris and Julie sets Tyreese on edge because it is a facet of the social dynamic he's not fully in control of; catching Glenn with Maggie is the event that pushes Hershel into ejecting Rick's group from the safety of his farm. Sex, physical contact, and pleasure are things we cling to when the world upends, but they also leverage already extant cleavages in the social dynamic--pairing off with one person is always already a matter of exclusion, and exclusion is a luxury that survivors don't have.
From the hip:
- It's interesting that the introduction of Tyreese--a powerful, former NFL player--doesn't shake up the masculine pecking order established earlier in the comic. He doesn't seem to challenge Rick's leadership of the group in any meaningful way. Is it assumed that the leader of the group will be white and this is just an unspoken part of the job's requirements?
- The depiction of Glenn as not masculine enough to be a leader is reinforced by the later revelation that he is a virgin. But now that he's got some stank on his hang-low I'm curious to see how his place in the larger narrative evolves. Also worth noting: Glenn isn't positioned as a potential leader and he's also not a white guy.
- I stopped watching the tv adaption of The Walking Dead once they reached the farmhouse because their stay there seemed interminable. The comic handles this episode at a much brisker pace; the comic's depiction of those events is quicker moving and ultimately more satisfying because of it.
This is a read-through of The Walking Dead, from the beginning: headshots only.
The first issue of The Walking Dead is all about establishing what the audience is supposed to know about Rick Grimes, the primary protagonist of the series. We are introduced to Rick in the middle of a gunfight in which he, as a police officer, is shot down by an escapee from a nearby prison. We next see Rick awaken in a hospital, the zombie apocalypse having happened in the interim. The juxtaposition of Rick being wounded and regaining consciousness amid a world gone to hell underlines an important trait that will define who Rick is: he is a survivor.
Rick's ability to survive whatever human and inhuman obstacles the story places in his way marks him as a protagonist; metaphorically, the ability to survive might be his "superpower." As the series unfolds, the narrative development is in how he survives and especially in what he finds difficult to survive or cope with.
However, the association between Rick and survival isn't meant to be taken as a solitary orientation; The Walking Dead is not the story of a lone wolf's struggle in a zombie-infested world. Instead, The Walking Dead is a story about community in the face of crisis. As such, Rick's survival skills have a communal, outward-facing focus. When Rick encounters Morgan and Duane, for example, he uses his abilities and access as a (former) policeman to give them guns and a better vehicle to help enable their survival in this tough new world. At this point in the story, this is Rick's default position: he is a survivor who feels a duty to help others survive.
Rick's default position proves to be troubled or strained by another trait of his that we're introduced to early on: his sensitivity and sentimentality. Even though he's been told by Morgan that wasting a bullet on a zombie that can't get at you squanders an important and limited resource, he takes the time to finish off a crippled and "suffering" zombie he had encountered earlier. Interestingly, Rick knows that his sentimentality is a potential liability; when he attempts to cheer himself up by relating the story of his son's birth--a story he tells to a horse, of all things--he remarks that "thinking about the good times makes all this seem so much worse."
Of course, forming communal bonds is itself a survival instinct for the protection of the herd, but forging those ties is rendered problematic by moments of profound upheaval and instability. There are dangers here: there is already fear about cultural backsliding in this new apocalyptic age (Donna's fear that the equality of the sexes will fall by the wayside), there is the possibility of old resentments tearing apart a new community now that the old boundaries of social propriety are no longer in play (Shane's feelings for Lori), there are conflicts of ideology (the religious Donna doesn't approve of Andrea and Amy sleeping with Dale in his trailer), there is tension over who is going to be the leader and who has the best plan for the group's future (Rick and Shane butt heads to establish alpha male status).
None of this is easy, and the group is essentially living during wartime as they are besieged by enemies from without and from within. The fault lines already apparent threaten to erupt into irreparable rifts; disagreement over responsibility for the deaths of Amy and Jim lead Shane and Rick into a deadly confrontation in the woods--a confrontation that only ends when Carl shoots and kills Shane before Shane has a chance to pull the trigger on his father. This is how The Walking Dead registers the fallout of the group's strain: it asks, how does this effect the youngest and most vulnerable members of the group? How are they changed by the experience? And can the adults manage and handle that change in the children?
The problems of survival and community collude to make Carl learn the hard way that killing a living, breathing man is not at all like killing a dead, shambling thing. It's a lesson he wouldn't have had to learn otherwise, but the world he now lives doesn't leave him with that luxury.
From the hip:
- I love that Rick's survivor skills are exemplified by how easily he adapts to using different modes of transportation; all within the first few issues he walks, rides a bike, drives a car, and rides a horse. That Rick can do anything!
- Rick and Lori's disagreement over whether Carl should have a gun to protect himself parallels the ongoing debates about access to firearms in the US. Here zombies stand in for "terrorists" and "criminals"; clearly an armed populace can better protect itself, right? Right?
- Note that many of the characters were plagued by debt before the zombie apocalypse, perhaps hinting that the alternative was a slow moving and persistent economic Armageddon.
- The issue where Carl kills Shane is the first issue that doesn't feature zombies. The violence between the living is allowed the space to stand on its own.
